IPS Insights: Linguistics Career Launch

Have you ever wished you had support to take advantage of a professional or career development opportunity that lies outside the scope of your academic research? The UCSB Individualized Professional Skills (IPS) Program is designed to help graduate students and postdoctoral scholars fill in the funding gaps for pursuing opportunities that support your professional development in a variety of career trajectories.

IPS Insights: We are excited to continue our series, "IPS Insights," where previous awardees share about their IPS-funded experiences in short, informational videos. Our latest featured video is by Marina Zhukova, a graduate student in Linguistics.

Marina attended the Linguistics Career Launch, which is a 4-week online career bootcamp for linguists willing to explore careers outside academia, organized by the Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). The Launch consists of 40+ hours of career material: mentoring hours, company profiles, informal networking with career linguists, discussion of specific jobs in industry, career management workshops, and more. Watch her video to learn more about her experience!

In Marina's Words: What I Learned

"This was truly a month of networking! I made over 50 new connections on LinkedIn, and I did some informational interviews with linguists who worked in the industries I was interested in: tech companies, consulting companies, startups. I also talked to people working at companies like Duolingo, ETS, Grammarly, Amazon, Google, and Apple, and was able to discover what specific roles linguists are taking on there after graduate school.

Even though I already knew a lot about the process of applying for internships and jobs for graduate students in the U.S., this bootcamp gave me the opportunity to summarize my knowledge about the internship and full-time roles application process, to understand what areas I could work in after graduation and what specific tasks linguists working in different roles in the industry perform, and to interact with like-minded graduate students across USA and Canada interested in careers outside of academia.

I really appreciate being given a wealth of relevant career information in such a short period of time, and I am very grateful to the organizers of the Linguistics Career Launch and IPS program for the opportunity to learn more about the state of the American job market for linguists holding PhDs from people who have already been down this road."

IPS Program Overview

Awards up to $1000 are granted to eligible UCSB graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from any discipline who wish to individually tailor their career paths with outside professional development opportunities. The purpose of the IPS program is to help grad students and postdocs take greater agency in their own career path by funding exploration of a range of professional development opportunities across a variety of career and skill interests.

The IPS Program is a collaboration between the Professional Development Series at the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships; the Graduate Division; the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; UCSB Innovation and Entrepreneurship initiative and CNSI Technology Incubator; Career Services; UCSB SACNAS Career Pathways Program via DoD HBCU/MI award W911NF-20-1-0294; UCSB's divisional deans; and external donors. Learn more about the program here!